Ligature use fell as the number of traditional hand compositors and hot metal typesetting machine operators dropped because of the mass production of the IBM Selectric brand of electric typewriter in 1961. As most of the early PC development was designed for the English language (which already treated ligatures as optional at best) dependence on ligatures did not carry over to digital. Early computer software in particular had no way to allow for ligature substitution (the automatic use of ligatures where appropriate), while most new digital typefaces did not include ligatures. The trend against digraph use was further strengthened by the desktop publishing revolution. A few, however, became characters in their own right, see below the sections about German ß, various Latin accented letters, & et al. Inexpensive phototypesetting machines in the 1970s (which did not require journeyman knowledge or training to operate) also generally avoid them. Sans serif typefaces, increasingly used for body text, generally avoid ligatures, though notable exceptions include Gill Sans and Futura. īecause of their complexity, ligatures began to fall out of use in the 20th century. Ligatures made printing with movable type easier because one sort would replace frequent combinations of letters and also allowed more complex and interesting character designs which would otherwise collide with one another. When printing with movable type was invented around 1450, typefaces included many ligatures and additional letters, as they were based on handwriting. For example, in some cases the ⟨fi⟩ ligature prints the letters ⟨f⟩ and ⟨i⟩ with a greater separation than when they are typeset as separate letters. In printing, a ligature is a group of characters that is typeset as a unit, so the characters do not have to be joined. In handwriting, a ligature is made by joining two or more characters in an atypical fashion by merging their parts, or by writing one above or inside the other. A widely used Th ligature in a handwriting-style typeface Manuscripts in the fourteenth century employed hundreds of such abbreviations. Scribes also used notational abbreviations to avoid having to write a whole character in one stroke. In many script forms, characters such as ⟨h⟩, ⟨m⟩, and ⟨n⟩ had their vertical strokes superimposed. For example, in blackletter, letters with right-facing bowls ( ⟨b⟩, ⟨o⟩, and ⟨p⟩) and those with left-facing bowls ( ⟨c⟩, ⟨e⟩, ⟨o⟩, ⟨d⟩, ⟨ g⟩ and ⟨q⟩) were written with the facing edges of the bowls superimposed. Others conjoined letters for aesthetic purposes. Medieval scribes who wrote in Latin increased their writing speed by combining characters and by introducing notational abbreviations. Īround the 9th and 10th centuries, monasteries became a fountainhead for these type of script modifications. However, in Nordic texts a particular type of ligature appeared for ll and tt, referred to as "broken l" and "broken t". During the medieval era several conventions existed (mostly diacritic marks). Doubles ( Geminated consonants) during the Roman Republic era were written as a sicilicus. Merchants especially needed a way to speed up the process of written communication and found that conjoining letters and abbreviating words for lay use was more convenient for record keeping and transaction than the bulky long forms. These new glyphs emerge alongside the proliferation of writing with a stylus, whether on paper or clay, and often for a practical reason: faster handwriting. Other notable ligatures, such as the Brahmic abugidas and the Germanic bind rune, figure prominently throughout ancient manuscripts. The earliest known script Sumerian cuneiform and Egyptian hieratic both include many cases of character combinations that gradually evolve from ligatures into separately recognizable characters. See also: Bind rune and scribal abbreviation
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Details
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |